Gender inequality in the social media newsfeed: a longitudinal analysis of media representations on Facebook (2014-2018)

Abstract

Understanding journalism as an essential activity for the full functioning of democracy and the social network Facebook as a strategic part of news circulation and on which media organizations have been depending to build audiences, we took as object of analysis the publications of traditional Brazilian news media (Folha de S.Paulo, O Estado de S. Paulo and O Globo) on their official Facebook pages between the years 2014 and 2018. A longitudinal analysis allowed us to understand how mainstream journalism acted amid the political instability that Brazil went through during the five years analyzed. For this work, we resorted to the quantitative analysis of a structured corpus to understand which journalistic contents were privileged by the main Brazilian newspapers and inserted in the public debate through Facebook. From a feminist perspective and using content analysis as a method, we were able to identify patterns that concern both audience interest and media content and representations. The results show that political issues dominate the news field in the social network. As for the people highlighted by the publications, women appear much less frequently than men. Although the country's most important political post was held by a woman between 2014 and 2016, this did not change the gender inequalities identified in the research.